"He vexes my goose-herd": What To Read Next If You Liked the Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nasir

Everybody loves the complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir – the question is, what will you read next, after you’ve finished the original series? Where should your next fix of Bronze Age-era complaints, at once timeless and at a great remove, come from?

Let us begin with the archive of lettters to Zenon, a court treasurer’s private secretary during the reign of Ptolemy II in Egypt during the 3rd century BCE.

The first complaint comes from the cat-minders of Boubastis, who object to being required to do any work not directly associated with feeding cats:

To Zenon, greetings from the temple slaves at Boubastis, who feed the cats. The king acted properly in giving our profession exemption from compulsory work throughout the land, and so did Apollonios too; we are from Sophthis. Leontiskos, forcing us to go, sent us to the harvest, and, so that we should not bother you, we finished the work given to us.

But now for the second time Leontiskos has sent us out to make bricks - there are two of us. He is just looking after the brick-makers in Sophthis, Amerōis and Bēsas, who should be doing this work - for his own advantage. Would you oblige us by proceeding to follow the instructions of the king and Apollonios, his finance minister. Apart from you we have no-one to complain to.

Farewell.

Equally of interest are the objections of the Arisnoite beekeepers. If I am honest, I cannot quite follow what is happening with the donkeys – either the beekeepers loaned them to Zenon’s workers in Philadelphia and need them back to carry beehives, or they already have donkeys but need new ones to carry the old donkeys about (this was the first reading I got from this letter, but it doesn’t make much sense).